“You’ve got it wrong,” I said. “I never killed anyone. You’re the one all the kids tell stories about. You smashed kids’ heads in. There was some kid you brain-damaged. You sent them into comas. Not me. You.”
He looked away, as though my words held no interest. Or maybe he just didn’t understand. When his eyes locked on mine, it was like there was fogged glass between us, like his madness kept him isolated from the world.
“Is your name Beckett?” I said, wanting something to take me away from the groans upstairs and my own cluttered thoughts.
His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. Saying no? In disgust? I couldn’t tell. He grunted, champed his jaws on the wide gag John Wald had put in his mouth, then looked at me questioningly. I had been thinking of removing it anyway. It seemed cruel to keep it in, and what harm was there to let him speak?
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll take it off. But no tricks. You don’t know what I can do with that mirror. I know all the rules now. If I want to, I can toss you into a million years ago, and forget you existed.”
His reaction to my ridiculous lie was strange. His eyes widened and his brows contracted as though in surprise and a kind of deep sadness all at once, then he lapsed back into dull hatred.
Swallowing my fear, I stepped forward. His hands and feet were still bound together, and the rope that tied him to the chair hadn’t moved. The gag was disgusting. I couldn’t even tell what sort of garment the stained, spit- soaked rag had once been part of.
He snapped at my fingers when I removed it, but I think it was more instinct than intention. I dropped the gag and retreated to my chair.
I was halfway through asking him his name, when he interrupted me, almost spitting out his words. “Kill yourself. Now.”
The boldness of the command took me aback momentarily. “Why—why should I do that?”
His lip curled in disgust. “Said you were my friend. Wanted all to work out for everyone. This is the way. Kill yourself.” He shook his head. “You won’t, will you? Even if I could show you it’s the only way.” I opened my mouth to reply, but he cut me off. “Go on, tell me you can’t. Tell me what happened has already happened, even if it’s still to come. Go on.” He spat beside himself. “I thought you were some kind of hero. Now I’d as soon kill you as look at you.”
At that, he lapsed into a silence of hours, most of which he spent staring fire at me.
Eventually, Wald came down and said that he and I should make a meal.
“Kill him,” the madman said to Wald, jerking his head to indicate me.
“Speak’st thou now?” said Wald. “Better silence. More to speak is more to lang regret.”
With the sparse food available, we muddled through a kitchen that was futuristic to Wald and antique to me, and managed to make oatmeal topped with sugar. Wald insisted on feeding his captive, and I was allowed up to see Rose while she sipped the sugar water that was all Lilly would allow.
She was pale and soaked with sweat, but gave me a weak half smile as I sat beside her. “Are you sure it isn’t tonight I die?”
I nodded. “I’m sure. If that’s any help.”
“It isn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sighed. “It’s not you that should be sorry. It’s that Clive Beckett.” She stopped for a moment, gasped in pain, then waited a moment as some wave in her subsided. “Dying and leaving me to this. Well. It’s not so long, and I’ll be with him.”
“Don’t think like that,” I said. “You’re going to have Curtis, soon. He’ll live.”
A keening snarl rose up from the wild man below.
Rose ignored it and reached a trembling, sweaty hand to grasp mine. “Funny, isn’t it?” she said. Another wave of pain rolled through her, this one longer and more intense. “All this year, I’ve been hearing about all of you in the future. The stories about Peggy’s love affair with Anthony—” Another pause for pain. “Kenny and Luka. About Kenny and his friends and their adventures, Kenny trapped in the past. I knew you before you came. About you and Luka and what happened between you.” She gave a short gasp, then clenched her teeth together, breathing in short, sharp hisses. Lilly soon hurried me back downstairs.
Lilly took occasional cigarette breaks over the next few hours, and on one of those I asked her why we didn’t find a hospital or a doctor. “We can’t move her,” she said. “She’s had bleeding, and the labor has started. As to bringing someone here, how would we explain ourselves? A madman tied up on one floor, a seventeenth- century blacksmith assisting a nurse from the future on the next.” She shook her head sadly. “Terrible as it is, I think we’re her best hope. I didn’t do training in obstetrics. I was a war nurse. But I’ve had your note for ten years. I knew I would do this. I’ve been preparing, and I have thirty more years of medical science than whatever country doctor we could find. Anyway, in 1917, nobody reserves the best treatment for unwed mothers. They’ll spare the baby if it comes to it, at the cost of the mother’s life.”
More waiting, more cries. Some sleep. Then I woke in a convulsion of panic when I heard a scream of terror and a crash of cutlery and broken glass.
Standing not five feet from me in the doorway of the little house was Mrs. Hollerith, ten years younger than I’d seen her last, holding a tipped tray and staring at a bloody-handed John Wald halfway down the stairs.
Three
Head will hurt. Death’s a cert.
“What … ” said Mrs. Hollerith. “What—what—”
“Oh, what do you think?” said Lilly, descending the stairs. “Your daughter’s giving birth, you fool. Your daughter, whom you knew fine well was pregnant, is having her baby a month too soon.”
Francine Hollerith’s mouth opened and closed.
“What was your plan?” said Lilly. She reached Mrs. Hollerith and dropped her voice to a furious whisper. “Did you want her to die in childbirth so your problem would go away? If that’s the case, you were doing a fine job. With luck, I’ll save her. Is that a problem?”
Mrs. Hollerith’s face settled into an expression I don’t have a name for. Something like a cold acceptance of the new way things were. “Fine,” she said. “And who are all of—”
She was interrupted with a scream. Prince Harming must have fallen asleep some time after I did, but he was awake again. “Kill him!” he screamed to Francine Hollerith. “Kill him! Help me and kill him. He’s going to kill my wife. Everything from him’s a lie. Let me loose and I’ll do it.”
Mrs. Hollerith stepped back and held her tray like a shield.
I spread my hands. “I’m not going to kill anyone. I just came here to help.”
Wald leaped down the last few stairs, picked up Prince Harming’s discarded gag, and struggled it back into his mouth over the madman’s screamed protests.
Mrs. Hollerith looked from one of us to another. “Well, let me see my daughter,” she said at last, and strode to the stairs, pushing past Lilly as she went up. Then she turned for a last word. “And get this madman out of here.”
Behind his gag, Prince Harming gave a heartbroken wail.
“Why is he getting worse now?” I said. “I thought he had started to calm down.”
“Sees it coming,” said Wald. “Whate’er this thing, he feels its shadow.” He took Prince Harming by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “List me now, witling. Thou wishest to stave some doom, is’t so?”
The madman cocked his head to one side, then nodded.
“Well and good,” said Wald. He turned to me. “I said we’d riddle this one in time. Mayhaps ’tis now.” He met Prince Harming’s wild gaze again, hands still grasping the straining shoulders. “Now list again. I will not let ye kill young Kennit, hear? If there is some doom to stave, we might yet aid thee.” He spoke slowly, as though to a child. “We must have words, na? Peace and words. I’ll loose the clout that stops thy voice. Speak thy bit.”
With that, he took the gag away again, and Prince Harming took a deep breath before speaking. “Not kill then,” he said. “Tie him up. Tie and hold him here.”
Wald shook his head. “No talk of that. Kennit’s a friend. Talk of what thou wouldst prevent.”
